So about six months ago my neighbor knocked on my door asking if she could use my wifi temporarily because hers was down and she needed to work from home. I gave her the password thinking it would just be for a few days.
Well her internet apparently got fixed weeks ago but she’s still using mine. I’ve noticed my connection has been slower lately and when I checked my router there are like five devices connected that aren’t mine. Her whole family is basically using my internet that I pay for.
I finally changed my password last week without telling her and she came over asking what happened. I explained that I expected it to be temporary and that my internet has been running slow. She seemed surprised and said she thought it was fine since I never said anything before.
She mentioned that internet bills are expensive and she was grateful to save money. Now she’s asking if she can just pay me like half of what my bill costs to keep using it.
Part of me feels bad because they’re clearly struggling financially and it was helping them out. But I also feel like I was being taken advantage of since she never offered to pay anything before and just assumed she could keep using it indefinitely.
Am I the asshole for cutting off access without warning or should I let them keep using it if they pay me something?
Comments
YOUR wifi.
There’s your answer.
nta and you don’t know her. How is her saving money your problem? Don’t you have to save money too plus she never said it was gonna last this long or have her whole family use it. She’s taking advantage of
NTA. She asked to use the wifi TEMPORARILY. You were right to cut her off. Her financial problems are not your concern. You already acted like a good neighbour.
I would never let someone I didn’t know use my wifi. What if they use it for nefarious purposes?
Temporarily was a week or two. If she was going to use it longer, she should have asked – it wasn’t on you to approach her.
You should have changed the password months ago. However, if she’s WFH, she needs a connection. But places like a coffee shop or the public library have free wifi and she can use those places while she gets her own plan back online.
She got half a year for free and that should be seen as a gift.
You’re not the AH. 😎 Letting your neighbor use your Wi-Fi was cool, but six months and five devices later? Nah, they’re mooching. Your internet’s slow, and they never offered to pay till you cut them off. Shady.
You’re not obligated to share, but if you’re feeling nice, maybe let them pay a fair split. Your call.
I did that and had issues with the wifi I was currently troubleshooting. My neighbor comes upstairs beet red in the face and demands to know what the issue was. They were not on my network after that exchange. Save yourself the headache.
NTA at all. She was straight up stealing ur bandwidth for months. If she wanted to keep using it she shoulda offered to pay way sooner
NTA, holy entitled 🤦♀️
NTA
You said it was temporary, I let it slide until I needed the bandwidth as there seems to be 5 devices connected, and not just the one I thought you needed for work. You need your own service, not paying half of my bill and slowing my network down.
u/bot-sleuth-bot
Sigh. This one again? This seems to pop up every few days.
What if one of those five mystery devices downloads something illegal? The feds will check the account name.
Thought for a second that said wife and not Wi-Fi
If your are going to share wifi passwords share the guest one and make sure the guest one cannot access internal resources.
Your don’t want neighbors being about to see shares snooped traffic, access router admin portal! Your also don’t want them to see any shared videos and you don’t want to see their shared videos or be able to cast too chrome cast/fire.
Let her pay you if you want. You d create a guest account that can’t touch your devices and severely limit the bandwidth – say 25 down/10 up. If you have a good connection, probably won’t even notice it on your side. Plus, she pays half. If she doesn’t, just delete that guest account.
NTA. It’s your wifi that you let her use for a few days. Rather than get her own up and running she connected everything in her house and caused you inconvenience for weeks. I had a similar situation with my next door neighbour, he was changing providers and was a couple of weeks without service. Unlike your neighbour he told me when his internet was back on and bought me a lovely gift basket to say thanks.
You help good neighbours, you cut off mooching ones.
Tell her no, sorry. Her family connects too many devices. You need it to run for you.
We you can setup a guest mode and have it at a lower speed
I’ve seen a lot of these lately but, on the off chance someone actually needs an answer: NTA. If hers is down and she needs to work, she can take her laptop to a coffee shop or library. She certainly doesn’t get to hand your password out like it’s free candy.
“She mentioned that internet bills are expensive and she was grateful to save money.” What kind of logic even is this? 1) Her internet is fixed, so even if she’s using yours, she’ll still have a monthly bill unless she disconnects it. 2) The way jobs work is, you have expenses. You trade your time working for your employer, for money to pay for your expenses. Her internet bill is part of what she gets a paycheck for, and her asking to use yours for free/cheap because she was “grateful to save money” is like you asking for a percentage of her paycheck because “you could really use some extra cash.” The entitlement is mind-boggling! 3) What does she think you are, her sugar mama/daddy without the sugar?
Last but certainly not least, if anyone uses your internet for nefarious purposes, it will trace back to you, and you will be the one liable. Stop handing out passwords to your accounts! Let entitled Karens grumble about how “selfish” you are until they are blue in the face.
Get my door mat, as it reads:
My home
My WiFi
My Rules
5G service (I use Verizon) is quite cheap.
Letting someone use your WiFi can be problematic.
Let’s say that she has a member of her household who downloads illegal stuff – that will come back to YOUR IP address. It could be child porn, pirated films, pirated games, they could be chatting with a terrorist group, or hacking companies and placing ransomwear on their system.
Not worth it.
NTA she should’ve stopped using it whenever theirs got back up and running you did the right thing by changing the password
In the future, if this situation were ever to happen again, I think a lot of routers these days allow you to set up ‘guest’ partitions of your wifi. Important reasons to do this are so you can throttle how fast the connection can go (so they can’t just stream off it indefinitely), random people don’t have access to your wifi (which is a cyber security risk), and allows you to cut access without having to change your whole password.
NTA, don’t ever give anyone you don’t trust with your financial information access to your wifi
6 months? Wow
Split it 3 ways 50/50/50
I did this with my upstairs neighbor. I paid for the internet and she used the wifi and we split it 50/50.
Other adults may be using the internet in her house. You don’t know her or them. You don’t know what all of them are doing. Are they doing anything illegal? You don’t know.
For your safety and security, do not share your internet service with others.
You are NTA for not sharing your internet with strangers.
Tell her to move to India. They have the world’s cheapest Internet access over there. But the government also has a tendency to switch the Internet off.
I pay 40 bucks for internet. No your not tell her if multiple people there can’t pay for internet it’s not your problem.
If they had come and asked you if they could use it, and not for watching movies or TV, but for essential stuff, then yes I think you might have been OK. But they’re just taking the piss, so NTA.